


Rental Comfort

by Candlejack



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-01 05:23:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12149508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Candlejack/pseuds/Candlejack
Summary: Vincent is tired of his son never leaving his room and hires Sebastian (a sibling for hire) to coax him out.





	1. RENUNCIATION

The little Phantomhive lord was deep into the dungeon when a human visitor entered his domain in reality. It had yet to come to his attention, as his mind was deep into the fantasy world of his screen. His hearing cut off by the blasting music and sound effects of his headphones, and his attention deep on the clicking and shifting of keyboards. His one eye focusing deep on the tip of the life-bar of the enemy. Four of the life-bars were already defeated. He and his team only needed the last one. 

A finger tapped against his skull. 

In a mixture of surprise and fear, the boy wrenched the headphones off himself, no longer focused on the grey screen of his deceased MMORPG character. Every second was valuable on the battlefield, and now it was game over for him. 

“Hello,” said a stranger with jet-black hair who stood too close behind him. With a crooked smile and a show of teeth, he held his hand out in greeting. 

“I’m Sebastian. You can nickname me whatever you would like. From today, I am your big brother.” Sebastian had a way with words, but this did not fool the one eyed-boy. He narrowed said eye at the stranger, refusing to talk. His father had informed him of this. His refusal to leave his room would inevitably mean hiring someone to force him out. 

Sebastian’s optimistic smile became strained.

“Shy? That’s alright. There’s lots of things we can do. What is that game you’re playing?” Sebastian’s finger pointed towards the screen. 

The young boy followed the older man’s finger, until his eyes reached the screen. Expecting to find a grey screen of a game over, he jumped back onto the keyboard when he noticed the color had returned. The green witch had resurrected him, and his team was nearly losing without his buffs and de-buffs. With a few quick taps and skill-full aiming, he managed to get the game back on track. 

“Thank you,” the timid boy wrote into the chat system, his fast fingers typing like a lightning bolt.

“You’re welcome, dear,” came the green reply. The crook of his lip turned. In the reflection of the monitor, he saw his supposed “brother”, stand behind him, reading everything on the screen like a hawk, or a crow. 

He figured his father would pull something like this sooner or later, but he had never thought he would be this creative. If he refused to go to the psychiatrist, then the psychiatrist would have to come to him. 

“Let’s make this easy for both of us,” Sebastian said, pulling something out of his pocket while the boy was typing de-buff shortcuts on the keyboard. 

“You write down what personality traits you want in a brother, and I’ll try to accommodate them.” Sebastian really tried to act sincere, but they both knew that they were making this difficult for each other. 

He refused to answer him again. 

“I get paid by the hour, so it doesn’t really matter to me,” Sebastian said, and walked to the other side of the room. He sat on a bed, belonging to the boy, and marveled at the softness. Rich people really splurged on the necessities. He pulled out his beat up iphone and typed a message: 

“I’m babysitting a brat. What are you doing RN?” 

In the corner of his cone of vision, he caught the boy at the computer grabbing a pen and hurriedly writing something on the paper. 

So he did have a particular taste in mind? What a tough kid this was to crack. Looking around, Sebastian noticed various paraphilia. Toys and colorful books adorned his shelfs. They seemed like expensive things from all around the globe. A few from old retro video games, some toys were even older, and some were brand new and still in their boxes. This kid was a spoiled brat for sure.

 

\----------------

 

In a restaurant, in a finer part of town, sat a boy loudly speaking into his cellphone.

“Right? Ciel, come on, that’s pathetic, really.” 

It was a blond boy, and from the tidbits of their conversation, one would guess that he was speaking idly to Ciel as he waited for his dinner to arrive. 

“No way. Your dad did that? That’s kinda sad, isn’t it. Can’t you just talk to him?” 

It was starting to bother the other guests how loud the blond was speaking, but he paid it no mind, as he continued his chatter undisturbed by their stares. 

“Alois-“ 

“No way! Oh my God… A babysitter? But is he cute?” The tip of his finger curled against a loose lock of hair, twirling it idly as he spoke. 

“Okay, but you didn’t answer me if he was cute or not,” Alois had half the mind not to stick his tongue out in public, but he was right on the brink to. He always loved teasing Ciel, even if it was through the phone. 

“Alois…” Claude repeated himself, hoping to at least get him to talk quieter. It was to no use. 

“Ha! I knew it. You’re so easy to read,” Alois closed his eyes. Of course he was ignoring Claude on purpose. It was the only way to ever get any kind of rouse out of him. 

Claude knew it was futile to try. Alois would continue to speak loudly into his phone until he was done with the call, and there was nothing he could do about it, lest he wanted the blond to throw a tantrum. He in turn, looked at his own cellphone. 

One un-replied to message from Sebastian Michaelis. 

They weren’t quite friends, but they weren’t quite enemies. They were just two people who had a few things in common, so they decided to keep in touch. The texting was more one-sided, with Sebastian writing to him whenever he was bored and Claude replying in single sentence replies. 

His reply to Sebastian was, as always, short and precise: “The same.” 

He glanced up at his still yapping date. Alois’s etiquette was being erased away, his leg crossed and shaking, his hand excessively twirling a lock of hair and his face scowling. How very youthful. Upon a glance at a woman staring disapprovingly at the blond, he retaliated with a provocative head gesture at the lady, forcing her to look away to keep her dignity. In humiliation, she packed her things, getting ready to leave with her husband. 

Anyone would think Alois was nothing more but a loud-mouthed foul-acting brat by his actions, but there was more. At the sight of the couple leaving, his expression flickered between relief and sadness. His rowdy attitude hid his insecurities, and his anger protected the attitude. When the anger subsided, all that was left within him was regret. He had built up a front to protect himself, and this was the very thing that was hurting him now. 

Alois turned towards his date and lifted his eyebrow. 

Claude had to force the grin off his own face. What a strange slip-up. He would make sure it would not happen again. 

“I’ll talk to you later. Yeah. I’ll talk to you later,” Alois finally hung up, if a bit carefully. He had hoped his talking back and forth with Ciel would invoke some kind of jealousy within Claude, but given his unsettling smile, he did not seem very jealous.  
Any kind of reaction was better than none, so he would take it, even if it was not what he had hoped for. 

Claude’s phone pinged again. 

“Are you creeping on underage kids again? Should I get the law involved with this?” Empty threads from Michaelis showed up on his phone for a moment too long. Alois’s sharp eyes had time enough to read them before Claude could hide his phone away in his pocket.

“Are you creeping on me?” He asked with a devious grin, his head in his hands. 

The waiter came just in time, placing their orders on the table. 

“If that is what you want,” Claude loosely replied, not really giving any answer. He typed an answer before setting his phone on silent mode. 

\----------------

“No comment,” the reply from Faustus glowed on his phone. Typical. That guy had issues. 

Sebastian glanced over at the boy in the computer chair, who was now watching a movie. Whatever. It was impossible for him to help a patient who did not want it. The parents could push anything they wanted on their children, but if it is not of their own will, then they would never get better. 

“Time’s almost up,” Sebastian said, scratching his head. The boy didn’t move at all. He pretended not to hear him, but Sebastian wasn’t stupid. Only one of his earphones were on. 

“It’s been nice. We might see each other again and we might not,” there was really not much else to say. With a few steps towards the door, Sebastian stopped up. Oh, right. The paper that he had requested the boy fill out. He took a few strides back towards the boy, noticing how he tensed up.

“Can I have the paper back?” Sebastian stretched out his hand.  
With a slow, careful movement, the tiny boy picked up the paper he had scribbled a bit on and handed it back to the man. There was columns and columns of things for the boy to fill out.

Allergies, favorite amusement spots, favorite movies, favorite genres, favorite games, books, music, personality type, and the list went on and on. 

There was only one thing written on the paper.

“I DON’T NEED ANY FAKE BROTHERS,” in a jagged handwriting across the entire page. This was by far the toughest customer Sebastian ever had. Somehow, that made it more interesting. With careful thinking, he might have some fun with the boy, if not just for the fun of messing with his head, but with the fun of actually teaching the kid a thing or two about manners. 

“What’s your name, boy?” There was so much anger in this boy. He had expected a plain normal hormonal imbalance, or a pre-teen rebellion, but this was rooted someplace else entirely. 

“Ciel Phantomhive,” the boy spoke up for the first time in hours, his voice scratchy from the silence.


	2. INVITATION

Sebastian liked psychology. He liked children’s psychology, which was why he majored it in school. He found great joy in teaching children, and in teaching them how to smile again.

He hated pre-teens.

There was this short segment in the human lifecycle where the human becomes an insufferable little vermin, hell-bent on engraving their existence into the skull of the world, even if it meant by acting up as the loudest brat ever to have lived. Elderly, teenagers, children, infants, anything was a million times better than pre-teens.

Which is why he felt incredibly stupid for applying to a job that involved dealing with pre-teens.

His job seemed simple.

Take a kid who doesn’t want to leave the house. Build trust. Make them leave the house.

It was a lot harder than he had ever figured.

“Is there something I need to know about him?” Sebastian asked while counting the bills he had just received from the Butler.

“Know about whom?” Tanaka, their butler, crossed out his duty of paying Sebastian in his tiny notebook.

“Ciel. Anything special?” The money was all there. He stuffed the loose bills into his wallet.

The butler took a long pause, opening his mouth, as if hesitating to speak a little, but then changing his mind mid-sentence.

“Not as far as I am familiar of,” Tanaka said sternly, pocketing his tiny notebook into his breast pocket. Sebastian nodded. A dutiful butler who kept his mouth shut about the family secrets. He could respect that.

As he made his way to the kids bedrooms, where the boy spent most of his days locked up inside, Sebastian paused. There were five rooms on the upper floor. Sebastian calculated that one must have been the guest room, and the other a room for Tanaka to sleep in.  
He gathered the bad feeling in his chest and barged into the young boy’s room. The one eyed-boy was alert this time, throwing his headphones off at his entry with an enraged expression.

“Can you learn how to knock?” The little boy turned on his computer chair, rolling it around to face his enemy.

“Sorry, Ciel. Just pretend I’m not here,” Sebastian closed the door behind him and sat down on his bed, pulling his phone out again. Sebastian could feel his eyes burning holes into him.

If that brat wasn’t going to open up to him, then what was even the point in being here?

“Hey Mister!”

“My name is Sebastian, Ciel,” Sebastian made a point to stress his name out. If Sebastian could remember his name, then how come the brat couldn’t take two seconds to remember his?

“Alright, Sebastian,” and the boy stressed his name just as obnoxiously, “can you do me a favor?”

The older man humored him.

“Sure, what do you want?” Sebastian asked him.

“Can you leave me alone?”

Sebastian felt the urge to laugh, but forced it away.

“Like I said before, no. I’m getting paid by the hour to be here and babysit you, and I’m not turning down easy money,” Sebastian flipped through the games on his phone. Sugar Crush didn’t seem so bad. The boy kept glaring his way, and Sebastian repaid his attention by turning up the volume of the game.

The boy managed to glare at him as he used up all five lives on one level.

“Are you going to stare at me for another,” Sebastian checked his watch, “two hours and forty minutes?”

The boy said nothing, but continued to glare with his one eye. This kid was beginning to annoy him.

“If you have a problem with me being here, you should talk to your dad about it. He hired me,” he owed it to the kid to be honest. “I can’t help you if you don’t want my help.”  
The boy clutched his chair, looking away.

“Maybe I don’t need help. I’m fine the way things are now,” even the boy could hear it was a lie.

“You don’t sound fine,” Sebastian emphasized, “Sitting all day inside isn’t fine.”

“I am fine,” the boy snapped. He and Sebastian shared a glare. They continued to stare at one another until the older of them relented. Why was he picking a fight with a 13 year old? If anything, that made him seem like the immature one.

“Can we just watch a movie or something?” If the boy refused to talk, at least he could try to become friends with him. Start out small, and build the trust first. The one eyed-boy glared at him, and Sebastian shrugged.

After a long wait, the boy spoke up.

“Okay, but… I choose what movie we watch.”

 

\----------------

 

“Alois, go home already,” Elizabeth whined next to him on the couch.

“No, shut up, I’m watching a movie,” he barked back at her. Elizabeth kicked him softly with the side of her foot on his leg.

“Can you at least invite Ciel over?” She begged with a pout.

“No, just please let me stay.”

“Not unless you please invite Ciel.”

The two blondes were equally whiny.

Paula walked in with a tray of cookies, hoping to appease them both at once. If there was one thing she knew about kids, is was that the best way to their hearts was through their stomachs. At least all the kids she had to babysit. The two kids both took a handful of cookies from the tray, holding them like Wolverine’s claws and stuffing their mouths until the tray was empty.

“Oh dear, I’m gonna go make some more,” Paula excused herself, walking back out into the kitchen.

“I should tell Ciel how nasty you behave whenever he’s not there,” Alois laughed with his mouth full.

“Oh, like he would believe you,” she said after she was done chewing. It did not take long for her to fill up with the next cookie.

“Uhm, yeah he would. I’m his best friend,” he smugly said, mouth still full.

“I’m his,” she struggled to find the next words. She did not want to say anything that could set either of them in a bad light, but she did not want to belittle their relationship either.

“Cousin,” Alois finished on her behalf, finally done chewing.

“Family,” she corrected him with a glare.

“I know about your little secret,” Alois dangled one last cookie in front of her face, loving the superiority he felt over her. He somehow knew that his unconditional hate towards anyone feminine had stemmed from somewhere unpleasant, but with Elizabeth it was different. She hated him back, and that was how they worked.

“You know nothing,” she corrected him again, but this time wrongly so. He smugly took a big bite from his last cookie, triumphantly chewing it slowly.

“Ciel tells me a secret or two when he’s drunk,” Aois admitted and the girl paled. It was no secret that for the two, their first crushes were one another. Their parents accepted it as childish innocence. They weren’t children anymore.

“Please don’t tell anyone, Alois, I’ll do anything,” she begged him, suddenly turning on her charm. This was when he found her absolutely disgusting.

“Give me your cookie and I won’t tell a soul,” he demanded after finally finishing his last one. She relented, handing it over into his greedy, but small hands. He devoured it instantly.

 

\----------------

 

In the end, to Sebastian’s surprise, the boy had picked a horror movie.

He really did not look like the type to enjoy horror, and he did not act that way either. The movie choice had been an odd one, about a mother exorcising a demon out of the house. Not really his first choice in a movie, but Sebastian enjoyed it. That was more than what he could have said about his viewing buddy. He had no clue what to tell Vincent.

So far, his reports back to Vincent had all been of the lines of: “Ciel did fine. We sat in his room and talked about video games.” But how would he explain his current scenario to the doting father?

“Ciel did fine. We watched a horror movie, and I traumatized your son for life. I don’t think he will ever be able to sleep again without fearing a hand descending from the ceiling to grab him.”

What a mess.

The boy sat next to him, clutching a pillow. It was at the climax of the movie, so the tension was high, and Sebastian had a feeling that the boy was about to faint from stress.  
The lady in the movie was reaching towards a slightly unhinged door, and if Sebastian knew his horror movies, then he had a feeling a screamer could appear any second. He glanced over at the boy who seemed oblivious to the spike in danger, leaning forward at the screen to catch any difference in the darkness.

Oh boy.

This was going to be hilarious.

When the little boy was at the edge of the bed, his one eye wide and curious, the face of the monster appeared in the movie, jumping towards the screen at high speed. The boy snapped back with a loud gasp, almost knocking backwards into the wall behind him. After the shock scene, the climax of the tension died down, and now that the monster had shown its true form, it was no longer frightening. It merely resembled that of a bird a bit. Or a spider. Sebastian honestly couldn’t tell. The boy’s breathing had yet to settle down, and Sebastian cast him another worried glance.

“Are you ok, Ciel?” The older male saw the boy crawl from the bed, over to his computer desk where he searched one of the drawers. It seemed the boy had found what he was looking for with the click and swoosh of an inhaler. He figured it was pretty important to leave out that the kid had asthma, but he stuffed it into his memory bank and moved on with his life. The one eyed boy walked back, crawled back onto his spot on the bed next to Sebastian. While burying his face in the pillow, he shamefully mumbled something.

“I can’t hear you,” Sebastian said between munches of popcorn.

“Don’t tell anyone. It’s not cool,” he repeated.

“I don’t care.” So the kid had some issues with how people saw him? He had not expected anything differently from a kid getting homeschooled.

His response, albeit a bit blunt and rude, cheered the boy up, and he saw the rest of the movie with only a mild discomfort. Sebastian noticed the boy crawl a bit closer at one point, but decided that it was not worth commenting on.

During the credits, the boy was hasty to turn off the movie and shut off the television altogether.

“What did you think?”

“About the movie? Not that scary,” Sebastian answered. Not that any horrors scared him these days.

“Really? Ah, what do you think about the techniques?” He asked with renewed energy.

“Techniques?” Sebastian had no idea that he had to look for that.

“Filming techniques. Their location, effects, music, all of that?” This kid was definitely not like normal kids. Sebastian had to chew on a while for that one. After enough careful thinking, he came to a conclusion.

“It was in the upper-tier compared to most horror movies. I like the experimental animated sequences here and there, even if they did break immersion now and then. The music score was a kind of stale, but I see no reason to re-invent the wheel all the time. Other than that, I’d give it a 8 out of 10.” After his monologue, he looked at his small fellow critic.

“What would make it perfect?” Sebastian did not have to think for long on that.

“If they lost,” he answered right away. “The good guys always win. I want to see them lose.” They stared at one another and made some sort of non-verbal agreement.

“I think that too. I wanted her to lose as well.” Not much was said after that. Sebastian knew they had limited time left until the next day, so he wanted to make the most out of it. Maybe this job was not as impossible as he first thought. With how high his payment was, there was no reason to not even make a slight effort. If there was even a slight chance that he could improve the boy’s life, then he’d take it. He had some sort of honor after all.

“Do you like watching horror movies, Ciel?” Start out small, Sebastian, he thought to himself. This kid might not be so bad.

“Not really,” came the sour reply.

“Then what do you like?”

The boy had to chew on it, before his one eye looked up at Sebastian.

“Games.”

It was not the answer he had expected at all, but he would take it.

“Do you like horror games?” If he didn’t like horror movies, then why would he like horror games. To Sebastian’s surprise, the boy nodded.

“I’m not brave enough to play them myself. My cousin used to play them for me, but…” According to Vincent, the boy had completely cut off contact with the rest of his family. What a shame. Sebastian could smell a chance at contact from a mile away.

“I’ll play them for you.”

The boy’s eye lighted up.

“If you find a good game for us to play tomorrow, then I’ll play while you watch.” Sebastian figured it could not be that hard to play a game.

“I’ll find one.”

Sebastian nodded and headed towards the door. Better to leave as the boy was getting excited for his next visit.

“See you tomorrow,” Sebastian said with a sly smile and a wave.

The boy nodded timidly back, trying not to seem too eager.

Sebastian only found it slightly endearing.

Like a dog drooling for a snack.

Mostly disgusting.


End file.
